The 5 Saddest Prostitutes in the World

#2. The World's Oldest Prostitutes

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I feel like if I expound in any way on the title of this entry, it's just going to make all of us feel bad in the soul. Is there any way the story of a prostitute who's encroaching on the century mark can not be terrible? Just horribly, horribly terrible? No. But I can make it worse by making this entry about three of them, all over 70 years old. Just to clarify, sex should never occur after 70 years old. That's not my opinion, that's like some kind of natural law. I'm sure I'll die in a blimp accident well before I'm 40, but if I did live to my 70s, I would expect to be entirely sex-free. For the terrors of sex past 70, I invite you to look at Hugh Hefner. Eew.

Let's start with the young 'un, 71-year-old Sygun Liebhart, who is not an Icelandic post-rock band but a kindly old tart from Connecticut who was peddling her backside on Backpage.com, which proves that some old people can and do understand the Internet.

Across the pond in England, it made headlines in 2011 when the grandmother of one of the judges on The X-Factor was revealed to be a prostitute at 81 years old. She apparently even charged 250 pounds, which is about $375 U.S. Part of me hopes that most of that money was for the cost of delicious cookies she baked, but I know it wasn't. Not really. It was just for her old, tired cookie that no one should want to eat.

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No, don't eat it, kid! Aww, that's gross. You're gross.

Taiwan beat that with the story of a lady who was 82 and caught on the street soliciting customers for about 300 Taiwanese dollars. Please have a sip of a beverage before reading how that converts to U.S. money. You good? It's about $10. I will take my $10 and go to Subway and get a soup and sandwich combo and a Dr. Pepper. That is what I will do with $10.

Finally, just for a little balance, let's go to Iowa. Ben Clifford Dawson, an 83-year-old in the running for local city council, was arrested on prostitution charges after trying to barter with a woman who owed him money by suggesting that he'd shave off some of the debt if she let him perform sex acts on her, which I assume means he wanted to give her the 23 Skidoo or the Eisenhower GumJob.

#1. Pony the Orangutan

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Say, do you have faith in humanity? Why don't you go ahead and put that in a tissue and wrap it up, give it a swirl in some Vaseline, and hand it to a hobo so he can jam it right up his ass, because you don't need it anymore. This story is whatever the polar opposite of funny is, with a detour through utter depravity and what the fuckery, but if you're going to cover the most heinous prostitutes on Earth, you really can't skip it. This is the story about an orangutan named Pony that was used as a sex slave in a village in Borneo. So that's pretty awful.

The orangutan was held captive at a brothel. She was chained to a wall and shaved every other day, so her skin was generally covered in pimples and mosquito bites. At this point you should be frowning mercilessly at the screen and cursing me for even telling you about this, but before you bust out your extra-special swears, let's just wrap up the horror with the final, awful details. Not only would Pony assume the position automatically when a man entered the room, but it took a rescue group over a year to free her, because the brothel owner and the locals wanted to keep her there so badly that they fought against her release. Police armed with automatic weapons had to be brought in to free her.

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This should be your face about now.

If you find yourself questioning your value in life, or feeling guilt over having let yourself down in achieving your goals, helping your loved ones, or performing well at whatever task you set your mind to, remember that, for all your failings, you never shaved and imprisoned an orangutan for the purposes of prostitution. Whatever else happens, if you're down and depressed and questioning your self-worth, you have never pimped an ape. Nor have you fought to keep that ape available for intermittent sexings. You are never as bad as you may feel you are, because you never sank this low.

Because I hate to leave you on a downer, it's worth noting that after she was rescued, Pony grew back a fine coat of ginger bed-head-looking fur and was released into a forest, where she started a whirlwind romance with Christina Ricci and killed several dudes.